Tenure good for professors, not so much for students

Most students attending Delta College rely on Rate My Professor or mutual friends for recommendations on professors.

However, most students aren’t aware if their professors are tenured or not.

Teacher tenure is a policy that restricts the ability to fire teachers, requiring a “just cause” rationale for firing.

Individual states have each established their own tenure systems.

The dangers of tenure professors is that they are settling instead of trying to improve in their teaching structures.

Tenure provides teachers with protections by making it difficult to fire teachers who earn tenure.

Some students feel some type of way toward these tenure professors.

“I think that it’s wrong in lower level education, but in higher-level education I don’t really think it’s an issue because everyone is responsible for their schooling. I’ve only came across one bad teacher so far at delta and she was horrible and racist,” said Marcus Rice Delta student.

Even tenured professors have something to say about it.

Every policy has its positive and negative sides, the good side allows teachers academic freedom, and you get job protection.

“I feel good that someone has my back, on the bad side it protects the negative ones as well, there is a trade off, people that aren’t doing things in the best interest of the students, bad behavior and it’s rare,” said Communication Studies Professor Steve Graham.

The question is should some professors be able to keep tenure if they aren’t serving in the best interest of the students?

“I don’t think some professors should be tenure because they are only in it for the money,” said Mariah Champion a student from Sacramento State.

An ex-records coordinator from University of the Pacific, Deborah Cummings, said some tenure professors are very opinionated- they feel entitled and they don’t like change.

For this reason it’s hard to move forward because they all have so many different opinions about every little thing so it makes it hard to move forward for the school in a positive way.

There are cases when professors with tenure who are called out for bad acts, including University of California Davis English Professor Joshua Clover who received news coverage earlier this year for a 2014 Tweet about police, including one that said: ““I am thankful that every living cop will one day be dead, some by their own hand, some by others, too many of old age #letsnotmakemore.”

The school has separated itself from Clover’s remarks.

“These statements do not reflect our institutional values. We respect and support law enforcement and believe that the UC Davis Police Department officers and staff and Chief Joe Farrow are critical partners with our entire academic community,” a statement from the school read.

Everyone is entitled to their own views, but opinion can go too far.

“Tenure is a badge that some professors wear as if they are perfect and will literally do anything they want,” said Delta student Jason Robison

Do Delta professors do whatever they want in the classroom after tenure?

“I mean it’s good job security from a teacher’s standpoint but it bites that there are some truly awful professors that don’t care and can do anything and can’t really get fired (easily anyways), depends on what perspective you look at it from. From a teacher perspective it’s great, [but from a] student perspective it’s kind of lousy,” said Genevieve Jerue, a Delta student.

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The Collegian is the student newspaper of San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, Calif. The paper is published six times a semester in the fall and spring.

As a First Amendment newspaper we pride ourselves on a commitment to the students of Delta College while maintaining independence. We reinvigorate the credo that the newspaper speaks for the students, checks abuses of power and stands vigilant in the protection of democracy and free speech.